Category: Reviews

Year2009PublisherRavensburgerAuthorStefan FeldPlayers2 – 5Age12 – 199Time90StrategyLuckInteractionComponents & DesignComplexityScore In 1557, the Portuguese first gained the right for permanent settlement on the[…]

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Fog still lies over the Loch, the early morning was silent a minute ago. Now, the silence is disturbed by a stampede of photographers, running around the lake, setting up their cameras. Because, once more, Nessie has been spotted, and all the papers want the best photos.

The Settlers of Catan have come a long way. From their little fictional island all the way to the USA in Trails to Rails and then all the way back to Europe to become Merchants of Europe. It’s been a long, strange trip.

I doesn’t actually take a lot of rules to create a great game. A very small set of simple rules plus one minimal twist is all it takes. A minimal twist like requiring you to predict the future. Welcome to Wizard.

Unusually for a detective game, in Sid Sackson’s Sleuth you won’t care at all for the whodunnit. Your real focus is the whatismissing. And if you played any other of Sackson’s games before, you will already expect that figuring out even that is going to take some brain-sweat. And you’re perfectly right with that expectation, too.

The Master Wizards all told you, don’t mess with Baba Yaga. But of course you wouldn’t listen, she is only one witch, what could she possibly do to you. And now you find yourself in the Wilderness, a few days missing from your memory and horribly disfigured, with parts of your body shrunken and grown completely out of proportion. And not in a way that you’d find advantageous. Your only way back to full humanoidity goes through Baba Yaga.

Everything is peaceful in the small town in New England. Nothing bad has happened yet this week. But it’s only monday, 2:00 am. And there we go, a gate to another world opens, monsters start pouring out. The inhabitants of Arkham suffer through a lot, if anything bad happens, it happens to them. Every time. They feel the Arkham Horror.

The game La Boca takes its name from the neighborhood La Boca in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a uniquely colorful place. Just as uniquely, the game La Boca is a puzzle game with strong player interaction, and that makes it a lot of fun to play.

In space, no one can hear you scream. Which is a shame, because the frustrated screams of your opponents really are fun. And you’d have plenty of opportunity to hear them in Theseus: The Dark Orbit if it wasn’t set in space. A simple movement rule that gives your opponent the chance to influence where you can and can’t go is the basis for a tense science fiction game that would have Sigourney Weaver seriously worried about her chance to survive.